And the Good News Is...

Today the price of crude oil closed down $1.73, to $75.30 a barrel. Last week oil prices spiked wildly again, on news of fighting in the Middle East and instability in Nigeria, at one point reaching as high as $78.

How quaint last year’s all-time high prices (twenty dollars below this year’s all-time highs) now seem, and how comforting that three-, four- and even five-dollar gas is here to stay. We’ve known for a long time that the only way to moderate petroleum consumption with its attendant Middle-Eastern petroleum dependency is to use less of it.

And so we are. Even though there are more cars on the road now than 12 months ago, “Gas use last month was 0.6% less than a year ago, the American Petroleum Institute reported, because ‘high fuel prices have led to decreased demand for gasoline and other refined oil products,’” according to a story that ran in April in USA Today.

But that’s only half the story. As significant as gas and oil prices is the fact that retail sales have taken a sudden unexpected downturn. American families are waking up on Sunday morning and realizing that they can’t, on this particular Sunday, pile into the old Ford Explorer and go tooling off to a distant Mega-WalMart to buy Chinese tchotchkes and sneakers. Between the rising prices of gas, and food, and rent, and the tchotchkes themselves…well, you get the picture.

Nariman Behravesh, an economist with Global Insight in Lexington, Mass says the latest sales figures are another indication that gasoline prices “are beginning to bite and are beginning to squeeze consumers pretty hard.”

What he doesn’t mention in his estimation of the plight of citizens is that we “consumers” are also getting squeezed between stagnant wages (for all but the very well off) and escalating housing and health care as well as energy prices.

There are times when I want to stand on a soapbox at the corner of Palm Canyon and Plaza Streets and shout to the workers and peasants of Palm Springs that these hardships they are experiencing are not temporary, that they are in a regime of higher prices and lower expectations for the long haul.

“For the long haul” is a very harsh phrase. It means “from now on.”

To what can we attribute the historically noteworthy health, contentment, satisfaction, docility, and mediocrity of the American people? To a very high standard of living, of course, but now that has begun to change. And yet, this might be good news.

I encourage people to try making do with less. You really might be happier that way.

Don’t count on politicians to restore our overrated standard of living. The political system in this country has failed.

I’m not saying we should swear off politics, however. A new politics will arise, appropriate to the new realities. And as Pericles is reported to have said, “If you don’t take an interest in politics, be assured that politics takes an interest in you.”

But what form that new politics will take is a total question mark at this point. As John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail in 1774, “We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not.”